Inside the factory that’ll build Defender
We take a look inside Land Rover’s £1bn Slovakian factory where the reborn Defender is being built
SLOVAKIA has a secret: it’s an automotive giant. Since 2007, no other nation has produced as many vehicles per capita as this former communist land, with car-making a fundamental part of the country’s transition from early crony capitalism post Czechoslovakia, to a highly developed free-market economy. More than one million new cars were made here in 2018; almost one for every five people living within its landlocked 19,000 square-mile territory.
Volkswagen has been building cars in Slovakia since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and continues to to this day. The cute little up! has enjoyed a prolonged stint on the firm’s Bratislava production line, alongside its SEAT Mii and Skoda Citigo sisters. Big SUVs like the VW Touareg, Audi Q7 and Porsche Cayenne are born here, too.
PSA also holds large investments in the country, as does Kia; both build many of their family hatchbacks for the European market here. But the most recent big name to invest in this small yet mighty automotive heartland is Jaguar Land Rover. JLR chose Nitra, a city in the west of the country, for its Slovakian factory.
Nitra is not a place with an enormous industrial heritage to boast of. For most of its near-1,200-year history it’s been an agricultural hub, with dairy and grain-processing factories intrinsically attached to its farming focus. A plastics factory installed during communist rule remains open to this day, but it’s just been dwarfed by JLR’s latest investment.
Sitting like an alien fortress in a lowland clearing north of the town is a brand-new car factory, the result of a £1billion investment. From a distance, the 300,000-square-metre facility dominates the scenery; up close, the plant is absolutely spotless.
Demand
Opened in October 2018, JLR Nitra can produce 150,000 Land Rovers a year. It’s a big deal for the city, as proven by an open day not long after the gates opened. Such events are necessary, Land Rover says, because it wants to let locals see what goes on in the plant, and because there is high demand from local schools for educational tours. This makes sense, because the huge amounts of automotive investment the country has seen means many future Slovak workers are likely to find employment at sites like Nitra.
The Discovery has rolled off the line since JLR Nitra opened, but now it shares space with Land Rover’s most-anticipated car for years: the all-new Defender. And it’s full steam ahead on the factory floor.
There’s nothing radical about how the reborn icon is made. The body, paint plus trim and finish shops are all present, while some new developments, such as a monorail production line called Kuka Pulse, are a first for Europe. But the biggest difference between Nitra and Slovakia’s other car plants isn’t its tech, but its people.
The city has a population of 76,000, and few have any expertise in automotive manufacturing, so recruiting those who work at Nitra has seen JLR invest heavily in skills and training, as well as machinery. We’re told the production line is staffed by former supermarket workers, butchers, builders and more, all of whom look right at home assembling the new Defender.
Many of the teams working there are all-female, too. Typically, only a fraction of the workforce at a Slovakian car plant are women, yet at JLR Nitra, 30 per cent of the 2,800 staff are female. And at the helm of it all is a Brit. Russ Leslie has worked for Land Rover since 1993, starting on the production line of the original Defender in Solihull, and moving to Slovakia in 2017. He’s very proud of what the company has created in this city, previously non-existent on the automotive map.
“We are fundamentally a British company,” Leslie says. “All of the engineering and design is still done at our UK facilities. But we are growing.” He adds: “Day one is the dirtiest it will ever be here; it will only get better.”
Given how impressive the Land Rover factory looked during our visit to Nitra, that’s some pronouncement.
“All of the engineering and design is still done at our UK facilities. But we are growing” RUSS LESLIE Operations director, JLR Nitra (right)